


finding amadeus

by mothwrites



Series: tripartite [7]
Category: Marvel (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Gen, Platonic Soulmates, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 23:54:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9096136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mothwrites/pseuds/mothwrites
Summary: Rick sulks on the sofa for a full two weeks before Bruce throws an atlas at him and says, “let’s get to work.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> Introducing Amadeus! Rick's got his work cut out for him. This is really short, but I just wanted to publish something to get the ball rolling on this again. This one will be a multi-chap.

Rick sulks on the sofa for a full two weeks before Bruce throws an atlas at him and says, “let’s get to work.”

Rick, half asleep, stares blearily up at him. “Huh?” The book is heavy, a solid weight resting on his stomach. A real book, made of paper and everything: a rarity in Stark Tower.

“You met someone,” Bruce stated. “When you were… travelling.” _Running away,_ he thinks, and Rick ignores him. “We’re going to find them. I _cannot_ watch you sulk for another second.”

That would be sweet, Rick thinks to himself, if he didn’t know Bruce better.

“They don’t want to be found,” Rick says sourly. He doesn’t say: they don’t want _me._ Sympathy from Bruce is rare and hard-won, and now doesn’t feel like the time. Bruce has a determined air about him. Rick just wants to sleep.

He flicks through the atlas, idly finding some pages on America. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

Bruce doesn’t answer, so he keeps looking through. Absent-minded, he turns to the pages for Manhattan: New York, then looks wider, and traces his fingers up the Hudson river. Bruce is silent and doesn’t break his concentration, and it’s only then that Rick realises he _is_ concentrating. His fingers waver. He loses it.

“Damn,” Rick curses.

“It’s a start,” Bruce says. He cranes his head to look where Rick’s hand ended up: a district outside New York, near the river.

“He’s moving around,” Rick says. He feels stupid for only cottoning on just now. Map tracing is an _old_ tradition. He used to do it on his phone when he was tracking Bruce, but paper works better, somehow. There’s a deeper pull to it, like he could sink his hand through the spine of the atlas and yank the kid through the paper.

“I used to do this with you,” Bruce says softly. “And Betty, but she never moved around much.” There’s a moment of silence and then Rick realises this old, dog-eared atlas _is_ Bruce’s, not just some book he found lying around in the tower, and that pull becomes deeper. “Tell me about him,” Bruce says.

“Not much to tell,” Rick admits. “Skinny kid. Korean. Looked around fourteen, maybe fifteen. He was carrying a coyote.”

Bruce stops short. “What? A coyote? Fully grown?”

“No, idiot, a puppy. It was all curled up in his coat.” The kid had been clinging on to it like it was the only thing he had left, and maybe it was. Rick didn’t know anything else about him.

“What about the other one?” Bruce asks, after a while.

Rick gears himself up to talk about the laundry girl; her bright green hair, the way she chewed on bubblegum, her big brown eyes. Instead, he shrugs. “Just a girl,” he says. “I only saw her in passing.”

Bruce doesn’t ask why he’s lying, and he appreciates that. He doesn’t know exactly why this is something he wants to keep from his mentor, but the girl seems private, somehow. Someone that should be hidden from Bruce. Rick doesn’t like the feeling, but he doesn’t stray from it either. He’s learning to trust his instincts.

They don’t know where to start, so on Peter’s suggestion they spend days combing through missing person’s reports. Then Tweets and Instagram tags. Then security camera feeds.

“I’m sure you shouldn’t know how to do this,” Rick says. He watches Peter flick through screens and feeds with ease, totally at home with surveillance technology and code. He wonders how much of this is Peter, and how much is Tony. “How _do_ you know how to do this?”

“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” Peter says like the bratty little brother he never had. “Okay, so what day did you meet him?”

“Twenty-fourth,” says Rick, because he’s not sure. Those weeks were kind of a blur, all heat and gas fumes and strangers.

“Time?”

Rick shrugs. “When did you call me?”

Peter wrinkles his nose at him, and then, suddenly understanding: “Oh, right. Just after midday? Let’s see.” He does some typing and some clicking - Rick’s given up trying to follow it, he’ll stick to radio - and a bunch of files come up on screen. Peter starts speeding through videos until Rick grabs his arm when he sees a tiny, blurry copy of himself walk out of a diner.

“ _There,_ ” Rick says, and something in his chest pulls. There’s the kid. Peter zooms in, and he can see him slightly more clearly; leaning against his shiny Vespa, cuddling a coyote pup and chugging a bottle of water like a man dying of thirst. On screen, he stops and pulls something out of his backpack, pouring the rest of the water into the makeshift bowl so that the puppy can drink. Peter freezes the frame on his face.

“That’s Amadeus Cho,” Tony says from the kitchen, with a tone that suggests he has surprised himself.

“You _know_ him?” Peter and Rick chorus.

“Sort of.” There’s a dark look on Tony’s face that Rick wasn’t expecting: not that he was expecting anyone to know the kid at all. _Amadeus._ The name sounds strange in his head, but he likes it.

“Cut it out,” Rick says. “Tell us.”

Tony sighs, and droops into the sofa cushion where he had been leaning over Peter to check his work. “He’s the sixth smartest person in the world.”

Slowly, the story comes out. Tony tells them how the previous sixth-smartest person in the world, a ‘washed up, bitter old man’ named Pythagoras Dupree, set up an online quiz to find people of exceptional genius so he could eliminate them. “Amadeus was only fifteen,” Tony says, “and he just blew the results out of the water. No-one had seen anything like it.”

“Did _you_ take the quiz?” Peter asked, interested, a shit-eating grin beginning to form.

Tony waved his question away. “I know where I rank. This is serious. Dupree killed his parents. I thought he’d killed the kid too.”

“Amadeus Cho?” Rick says, confirming the name again. He stands up when Tony nods. “I’m on it.”

He’s constantly hunting down geniuses.

Rick follows the tugging of his heartstrings out of the city, and realises that Amadeus hasn’t moved far out of the same perimeter outside New York that Rick had found him in before. _He doesn_ _’t have any family left,_ Rick thinks, gripping the handles of his motorcycle with excessive force, so his knuckles show up white. _All he_ _’s got is that puppy. No wonder he was holding it so close._ Rick wonders if Amadeus is staying close to the city because he senses that Rick is there. He hopes so. For the first time in his life, Rick feels almost mentor-like. Amadeus is just so _young_.

“Come on,” he murmurs to himself. He’s driving around aimlessly now, just waiting for something to feel significant. Waiting for some kind of sign. Waiting for a skinny Korean kid with a coyote puppy.

At some point, he realises he needs to eat something and inhale a gallon of water, and ends up driving towards a diner. It’s oddly familiar, somehow.

Amadeus is waiting for him.

_I_ _’m not waiting for you,_ Amadeus tells him immediately, as soon as he’s in his line of sight. _I’m just eating here._

_Sure,_ Rick says, sliding into the booth. _Whatever you say. Never mind that your plate’s empty and your coffee’s cold._

Somehow, it’s the right thing to say. Amadeus is cowed, but not defensive. A rueful smile comes upon his face. _Get us two fresh ones then,_ he says, _and we can talk._

_It’ll stunt your growth,_ Rick tells him, and flags down a waitress for two cups anyway. He’s channelling Bruce, sort of. It’s the only model he’s got to go on; besides, being Bruce’s Third never did him any harm, no matter what the old man thinks.

_Who’s Bruce?_ Amadeus asks after a sip of steaming coffee.

_That can wait,_ Rick says. They have not exchanged a word aloud since he walked in. _Who are you?_


End file.
